Black Friday starring Karloff and Lugosi: Streaming Review
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 เม.ย. 2024
- Mad Monsters of Maniacal Mayhem-BORIS KARLOFF BELA LUGOSI Devising Diabolical Develtry. We review Universal Horror "BLACK FRIDAY" 1940.
Watch on TH-cam: • Black Friday (1940)
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Summary: When his friend Professor Kingsley is at deaths door, brain surgeon Dr. Sovac saves his life by means of an illegal operation that transplants part of injured gangster Red Cannon's brain. Unfortunately, the operation has a disastrous Jeckll and Hyde side effect and under certain conditions the persona of Cannon emerges. Sovac soon learns of the duel personality and of half a million dollars the gangster has hidden away. He attempts to find the money through the manipulation of his friend, an attempt that brings Kingsley closer to madness as he alternates between a meek professor of English and a brutal gangster out for murderous revenge on those who tried to kill him.
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Written and presented by Robin Bailes @robinbailes
Directed and Edited by Graham Trelfer
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Stanley Ridges is the real stand out performance in this movie. He truly makes you believe that Professor Kingsley and Red Cannon are two different people.
The best Karloff/Lugosi pairing, for me, is The Black Cat: the eerie pacing, the German expressionism, the mind games between the two great men. And THAT ending. This feels more like a monogram pic.
Absolutely! It is my favorite of the Karloff-Lugosi films and indeed one of the best of the Universal Horrors. Hard to believe that Universal got away with it in an era when the Production Code was beginning to take hold. A year later, Universal might not have even attempted it because it would NEVER have gotten past the censors.
THE BLACK CAT is hands down my favorite, because of the air of menace permeating the film, generated at maximum power by Karloff and Lugosi.
I greatly enjoy ' The Raven ' . Bela threw subtlety out the window and substituted over the top theatrics which culminate in his joyously evil ' confession ' , ' I like to torture ! ' . There's a lot to savor for a film that barely runs over an hour.
Son of Frankenstein is the best usage of the Lugosi and Karloff pairing; with Lugosi as the hunchback with the brains and cunning, along with Karloff's monster muscles and emotions.
Fave Karloff-Lugosi pairings? For me, it would have to be their first and last films together: 1934's The Black Cat and 1945's The Body Snatcher. The first, directed by Edgar Ulmer, is a mad swirl of Satanism, horror, revenge melodrama, mystery thriller, and over-the-top Bauhaus architecture, with Karloff and Lugosi equally matched as vengeful adversaries, going at it hammer and tongs. The last is a Val Lewton classic, and while Lugosi has basically a supporting role, he and Karloff are wonderful and menacing together; and Karloff's own performance in this movie is one of his best. This film is also one of the best in the Lewton canon.
Excellent post! THE BODY SNATCHER is my favorite Val Lewton as well. Plus Henry Daniell was likewise superb as the morally compromised corpse recepient "Dr. MacFarlane".
Karloff/Lugosi pairing is clearly the Black Cat. Lugosi absolutely shone in Son of Frankenstein a film a absolutely love, although Karloff was kinda going through the paces a bit.
Black Friday is basically a gangster noir mixed with a body swap and it’s surprisingly pretty great in my opinion
Why not make Lugosi a Hungarian professor instead of an English one? And why not call the doctor that Karloff plays "Dr Acula" just to mess with people's minds? And why not call the picture "Curse Of The Revenge Of The Screaming Skull"? Days like this I'm full of good ideas.
The black cat. The thought of someone being skinned alive even after all these years is very disturbing
I really liked 1945's "The Body Snatcher"
Yeah 👍
Any film with Karloff is always worth my time.
4:21 That stunt person really looks like they got hurt! Thanks DC 👍
The Black Cat and The Raven are by far the best pairings of Karloff and Lugosi. Great atmosphere, unparalleled suspense and of course great acting.
I avidly worship at the twin altars of Karloff and Lugosi, but Stanley Ridges handily steals the film. He was a truly excellent character actor with a wonderfully distinctive voice, and his dual performance here is astonishingly accomplished. His work is deserving of much wider appreciation.
Has to be the Black Cat and Hjalmar versus Vitus. Lugosi has some great dialogue..."Many have gone there, few have returned. I have returned. After fifteen years, I have returned." though my favourite still has to be the way Boris delivers, "Did you hear that Vitus? Even the phone is dead."
I wish more was done with Bela Lugosi playing a gangster, it's so weird yet so fascinating at the same time.
Favorite Karloff & Lugosi pairing?
Well, no one else is mentioning it so I think a special shoutout needs to be made for "You'll Find Out" (1940), the only film where you get Karloff, Lugosi AND Peter Lorre together in in one film. Although, yet again, Lugosi is the one slighted the most out of the three of them, but at least you seem them together in the same scene.
As for their best... it's really between "The Black Cat" and "The Raven." Though they both suffer from the issue that they are too short, one seriously wishes "The Black Cat" was longer so that the literal & symbolic chess game between the two of them could be given room to breathe, and the overall film allowed to reach the epic proportion it deserves.
Although, I'm possibly more fascinated by the interplay between them in "The Raven." It's interesting watching Karloff play a crude thug who can commit violence, while Lugosi is this brilliant, sophisticated psychopath with no experience in violence. It's a dynamic that's very unique, especially with both of them struggling against the other's dominance, that may be entirely unique.
For now, I think I'll pick "The Raven."
Thank You for Reading.
I add my vote for The Black Cat as the best and most interesting of the Karloff/Lugosi films. Additionally, we can only imagine what cinematic offerings Edgar Ulmer may have produced for the big studios if he had shown more wisdom when pursuing romance. His film Detour showed his abilities couldn't be hidden by Poverty Row budgets, and I can't help wondering about what might have been.
Best Karloff-Lugosi pairing? Gotta be Body Snatcher.
A "brain transplant"?! And you think the film could have been saved by Karloff and Lugosi sharing screen time? I think I'd like a ruling on this matter: have Science Advisor resolve it, and no fair transplanting either of your brains into him beforehand.
I liked Bela Lugosi in this film he looked like he was having fun. " Let me out Let me out". :)
Unfortunately, the main flaws with this Karloff/Lugosi film is that Boris and Bela don't share a scene, Bela's role can be easily dispensed with, and the best performance comes from an actor no one came to see. Also, it really doesn't do justice to either the crime-film aesthetic OR the horror aesthetic.
That said, on its own terms, it's still fun. The relationship between the characters is interesting, and the actors were mostly kept busy. If anything, I actually would have loved a battle of words between Bela Lugosi and Stanley Ridges rather than Karloff and Ridges. Lugosi's style might have fit the Sovac character well. Whatever caused the shift in roles, it was clearly done at the last minute, so the description of Sovac as a European refugee fits Lugosi far more than Karloff. Admittedly, the casting of Anne Gwynne as Sovac's daughter doesn't really fit either actor well at all, but she was at least great eye candy. And no one bothered to build up the Marnay role for Lugosi's casting. He does have a few good lines, however, and I hope that Lugosi at least had fun playing an out-and-out gangster.
The main publicity this film got was a promotional stunt where Lugosi was "hypnotized" to believe he was suffocating in a closet. Nearly everyone admitted years later that it was pure hokum, but I hope it at least drummed up some interest in the film. Karloff supposedly remarked that Lugosi MUST have been hypnotized since he'd never seen Lugosi keep himself away from the camera for so long!
Sadly, this film really demonstrates the fall of Lugosi's fortunes at Universal from the first film he made with Karloff (The Black Cat), in which both actors were evenly matched, to the last (Black Friday) in which the actors shared no scenes together. The Raven gave Lugosi the out-and-out villain role, and no one made a better villain than Lugosi in the classic age of Universal Horror. The Invisible Ray gave Lugosi one of his few out-and-out GOOD GUY roles; he was fine in the role, but in the end, still overshadowed by Karloff. Son of Frankenstein was only intended to be a brief role for Lugosi, but director Rowland Lee insisted in keeping Lugosi in the film from the opening to the last, and the movie was all the better for it. Unfortunately, it taught Universal nothing, even if they did keep him around for the sequel Ghost of Frankenstein.
Didn't teach RKO anything either, as the last movie promoted as a Karloff/Lugosi film was The Body Snatcher, and, though Boris and Bela did share a scene together - one of Lugosi's best, IMO - it was still a very minor role.
I wonder if you might consider doing a video on the Karloff-Lugosi films. It would be fascinating, especially when you consider how Universal treated the two actors - always building up Karloff, while always downgrading Lugosi and ultimately killing his respectable movie career dead. Truly a shame.
FUN FACT: Boris Karloffs old house is now a chippy. I've delivered takeaways from there. The chips smell good.
That was the most aggressively British thing I've read in quite a while. 😅
I don't know what this means.
@@joseph7988- The house is now a restaurant that serves what the United States calls French fries (and presumably fish).
@@julietfischer5056 Thank you 👍
Does anyone remember the H. Salt Esquire Fish & Chips franchise from some years ago? They went out of business sometime in the Eighties (I'm guessing here) and I've missed them ever since. Their traditional fish & chips recipe was beyond great; I've never been able to find a comparable substitute anywhere. A pity.
To quote you in the The Man Withoit A Body review - "It's not your brain!!!"
That said, it's not the best Karloff/Lugosi film but have always enjoyed it.
Karloff not wanting to play a gangster though...The Criminal Code is what first got him noticed. There's a set on DVD of gangster films including that one of him playing gangsters.
First saw this way back in 1979 on a double bill with Hammer's The Mummy during that years BBC2 summer season.
The Black Cat is amazing and so rewatchable
There is a novelty to seeing Bela Lugosi playing a gangster instead of a horror part; probably one of (if not the last) times he played a non-ghoulish role and I do like him in this. Stanley Ridges is absolutely the star though; he should have done more horror/thriller roles. Karloff played gangster and unsavory types many times before; The Criminal Code, Five Star Final, etc. but I guess he figured that phase of his career was over for good. Great review for one that isn't discussed much anymore.
The Black Cat!
the black cat, Karloff, Lugosi, Poe and aleister Crowley. who can beat that mixture with German expressionism to boot
I do enjoy tem in The Body Snatcher.
Bela never could catch a break!
This is one of those movies that signals to me how little we understood the brain back then. I thought the doctors plan was to save his friends brain by placing it in the gangsters body, because the brain is y'know...him. but instead he puts the gangsters brain in his friends body because according to the movie, the brain plays only a small role in memory and personality.
I dunno -- I'd hate to have future generations judge the scientific knowledge of the 21st century by looking at movies like _Sunshine_ or _The Core._ 😀
Oh, they knew better, but the writer was trying to pay the rent. And I suppose they wanted Lugosi as the villain that badly.
IMO, one silver lining to the casting - and I'm sure many would say that it's an extremely thin silver lining - is that Lugosi is wonderful in this small role as a small-time gangster. He seems to delight in this character's eccentric mannerisms. I wish his character had more screen time.
I mean, can you ever really go wrong with Boris and Bela?
The perfect Karloff--Lugosi match-up? Like you even have to ask? The hands-down no-brainer would have to be Edgar G. Ulmer's THE BLACK CAT. It's a pre-Code masterpiece, and it goes without much saying one of the canonically great horror pictures of the 1930s. For what can one really say about an acknowledged classic that offers up so many of the perverse treats that a true horror aficionado can't help but love: necrophilia...ailurophobia...hypnagogic drugs...preserved female corpses...torture...flaying alive..and a fantastic-looking Black Mass presided over by an uncredited John Carradine as the black-cowled organist. Plus the whole party going out with a massive explosion that puts the lasting kibosh on on all the evil shenanigans---and all of this in a running time of under 70 minutes! Yowza! Like, what's not to like?
But the movie's real selling point has always remained the macabre chemistry of its two stars, the pair of them delivering a double whammy of a performance. The chill serpentine villainy and underplayed sadism of Karloff's "Hjalmar Poelzig" is elegantly counterpointed by the against-type casting of Lugosi as the tormented but essentially humane "Dr. Vitus Werdegast", their scenes together convincingly communicating a mutual if understated enmity effectively combined with a sense of mounting conflict.
But none of it could have been realized sans the obvious brilliance of Ulmer's direction. His sure handling of the darkly brooding atmospherics and the contrasting of black-and-white effects are more faithful to the spirit and imagination of the written Poe than any previous filmed attempt (causing at least one critic to hail the filmmaker as the "Aubrey Beardsley of the cinema" when it came to visualizing the world of Poe). It's often been pointed out that although the movie's narrative has virtually zilch to do with the actual story of its title, its claustrophobic and miasmic atmosphere captures a definite feeling of Poe, allied perhaps with a certain Kafkaesque sense of entrapment and dead-end hopelessness. In this latter regard a large chunk of the picture's artistic success has to be attributed to the moody cinematography of John Mescall (as in mescaline?) as well as the clearly expressionist-inspired set design.
(Classic bit: When Lugosi first sees the pickled body of his deceased wife Karin, Karloff suavely purrs: "I have cared for her tenderly and well".)
I remember how disappointed when I watched Black Friday.
It's also funny about Arthur Lubin because he directed a handful of Abbott and Costello comedies like Buck Privates. Maybe he was more comfortable there.
Also, The Black Cat is my favorite Karloff/Lugosi pairing, since they were equals at war with each other.
0:31 Look at that stunt.
I wish Bela had more screen time, but I have always really enjoyed this movie and watch it a few times a year. I usually watch this one with The Invisible Ray and Night Key
It's no Son of Frankenstein. But then again, few things are.
My favorite pair up is The Body Snatcher. It’s a great film & Lugosi gets a lot of mileage out of a short part. Also, Lugosi is playing against type & that’s always interesting
THE RAVEN is my favorite Karloff/Lugosi pairing.
Have they made a horror film about the pre-Christmas shopping day yet? It's probably only a matter of time.
Of course. There is the zombie comedy Black Friday,2022 and it serves as the opening event in last year's Thanksgiving. The real surprise is it took so long
@@DarkCornersReviews I should have known.
I think we'd all say THE BLACK CAT- though if I have to pick a second, I give it to SON OF FRANKENSTEIN.
The Black Cat is a masterpiece
Lugosi always done dirty... How come you've never reviewed Village of the Damned?
The patient being told he is Paralyized, while easily smoking, am I missing something?
Reminder. See the Vincent Price (beatnik) film "Confessions of an Opium Eater".
It is a truly bizarre film.
Its been years since I've seen this movie. I won't call it horror, more like a science fiction thriller. The guy Boris Karloff really couldn't get along with was Peter Lorre. Lorre improvise all his dialog will Karloff stuck to script.
Isn't all film flat? 🤔
I ❤ this movie
Thanks! Reminds me of the time I ate dog food and began running around on all fours barking. (Wasn't related, though. Don't judge!) 😮
Judgment.
@@jongroskin729 oh, WOOF!!
Eyy
Watch the Raven instead
Lugosi was a ham 🤢